Starting point

About every 6 weeks I am totally re-energized. 

No matter how frustrated I get, how bad things go, how things get misperceived, how many people say they will do something then don't - none of that matters because every 6 weeks I am reminded why I do what I do. 

In an environment called "starting point",  Konan and I present the story of how we started, where we are now and where we feel like God is leading C3. 

I get fired up every time I hear our pastor tell the story of "what if..."  

What if there was a place people genuinely felt welcome. What if people wanted to take off the masks. What if they trusted us enough to invite their friends. What if they believed Gods promises. What if they truly wanted a personal relationship with Jesus. What if they loved other people. What if they lived with a different focus other than themselves or more money. What if...

C3 gets to meet amazing people every week. We are blessed with guests and a lot of those guests attend starting point to hear "the story". 

My point: getting to hear the reason we started this journey about 7 years ago keeps everything in perspective. Keeping that focus helps minimize the challenges of life.

If ur getting frustrated or burnt out, revisit the reason u started. What was your starting point???

Super Sunday

So another Super Bowl has come and gone. It was a good enough game but not sure there is gonna be one great thing about the game that I will remember for years to come.

What I will remember are the super people that I spent time with on this day. We had 3 super full services at C3 this morning. Then lunch with super friends and family. Then a meeting with super partners in ministry then finally the game with more super friends.

My point: life is about relationships and the rest is just details. If ur gonna have relationships u may as well make them super.

I am a blessed man to have such super people in my life.

Go bucks!

Mastering conflict

The foundation of any relationship is trust. According to many leadership books one of the next most important things is mastering conflict.

Every relationship will have some sort of conflict at one time or another. How u respond to it will determine how deep the relationship can get. If u won't engage, it'll remain surface. If u engage to "win" or hurt the other person, it won't grow.

Mastering conflict means that u recognize it and work to resolution and do ur best find the "win win". If there doesn't seem to be a solution that everyone can agree on then u have to make the tough call for the good of the goal.

We had a person in a church service that had children being very loud and distracting. I was receiving texts and people trying to get my attention to deal with it.

I quietly and kindly asked her to bring the children out into the foyer so I could talk to her and explain our childcare options. I wanted to let her know we video and record the audio of our services so there are multiple reasons we ask children to go to their designated environments. This person decided they would just leave instead of cooperating. I guess there was no win win to them so I had to do what was best for everyone.

My point: sometimes you have to make a tough decision. Sometimes people get offended or hurt. Conflict will happen but we can't avoid it. We must master it.

One of my favorite communicators said "as a church, we will sacrifice one for all but never all for one".

Think about that statement. If the noisy children weren't asked to come out where they wouldn't distract others, we would've sacrificed all for one.

I hated to be the one to have to talk to them but I believe it was the best thing for the other couple hundred people who were in that service and who did cooperate by taking their kids to the age appropriate environments.

FYI: we publicly ask at the beginning of every service for families to take kids to their rooms. This family ignored that request...